Moses had been a member of the Arctic Society until his disgraceful behaviour at a meeting in 1969 had led to his being declared persona non grata.
The first item he retrieved from his Franklin papers was an interview, published in The Yellowknifer, with a granddaughter of Jock Roberts. Roberts had sailed into the Arctic in 1857 with Captain Francis Leopold M’Clintock. M’Clintock was seeking survivors of the lost Sir John Franklin expedition, a search that engaged the attention of the British Admiralty, the President of the United States, the Czar of Russia and, above all, Lady Jane Franklin. A ballad, popular in London at the time, ran:
Poor Franklin.
In 1845, only days before he set sail for the Polar Sea in quest of the Northwest Passage, the fifty-nine-year-old veteran of the Battle of Trafalgar was stricken with a premonition of the icy grave that awaited him. While he was napping on a sofa, Lady Franklin, thinking to warm him, spread over his legs the British Ensign which she was embroidering. Franklin promptly leapt to his feet. “There’s a flag thrown over me! Don’t you know they lay the Union Jack over a corpse?”
A complement of 134 officers and men and two stout, three-masted vessels of the bomb-ketch type were put at Franklin’s disposal. Both ships, rigged as barks, were fortified for their Arctic ordeal, their planking doubled, their bows and sterns bolstered to a thickness of eight feet. Crowds flocked to the dock when the Erebus and the Terror were scheduled to depart from the Thames. The officers were turned out smartly in tailcoats, round jackets, monkey jackets and greatcoats. For the voyage to circumnavigate the globe through the Northwest Passage they also took with them double-breasted waistcoats, stick-up collars, black silk neck handkerchiefs, and other fashionable items becoming to gentlemen at sea. Stout, jowly Franklin read his crew a sermon, taking the text from the seventeenth chapter of 1 Kings, wherein Elijah the Tishbite told how he hid himself by the brook Cherith, that was before Jordan, and how the ravens were commanded to feed him there, bringing him bread and flesh in the morning and again in the evening.
Among the supplies that had been loaded on to the ships were thousands of cans filled with preserved meat, soups, vegetables, flour, chocolate, tea, tobacco and, as proof against scurvy, lemon juice. Even so, some of the more fastidious members of the ships’ company thought it prudent to look to their needs. One officer, for instance, took on board assorted bonbons especially ordered from Fortnum & Mason. And then on the dark night before they sailed out of Stromness Harbour, in the Orkneys, their last home port, there was the curious case of the assistant surgeon of the Erebus boarding with a cabin boy wearing a silk top hat, the two of them lugging sacks of personal provisions. Six coils of stuffed derma, four dozen kosher salamis, a keg of schmaltz herring and uncounted jars of chicken fat, their pockets bulging with garlic cloves. The assistant surgeon and the cabin boy were jabbering in some guttural tongue, which the third lieutenant, whose watch it was, took to be a German dialect. On inquiry, however, the cabin boy insisted it was a patois that he and the assistant surgeon had picked up on a voyage to the South Seas.
Concern for Franklin did not surface until 1847. The Admiralty sent out three relief expeditions, unavailingly. By 1850, fleets of ships were searching the Arctic. One of them found three graves marked by head-boards. They were the tombs of two sailors from the Erebus and one from the Terror. The three men had been buried in 1846.
The quest for Franklin continued. In 1854, John Rae, surveying the Boothia Peninsula, met with a band of Eskimos who told him that Franklin’s party had starved to death after the loss of their ships, leaving accounts of their suffering in the mutilated corpses of some who had evidently furnished food for their unfortunate companions. Rae’s story was published in the Toronto Globe.
The fact that a Christian would accept the word of the natives on such an insidious matter inflamed not only Lady Franklin, but also other Britons, among them Charles Dickens. The source of these stories, Dickens wrote, was a covetous, treacherous and cruel people, with a proven taste for blood and blubber. Members of the Franklin expedition represented the “flower of the trained English navy,” and, therefore “it is in the highest degree improbable that such men would, or could, in any extremity of hunger, alleviate the pains of starvation by this horrible means.”
Three years later Jock Roberts joined the continuing search, sailing with M’Clintock on the Fox. In April 1859 M’Clintock reached King William Island, where he found a lifeboat from the Erebus on the western shore, some sixty-five miles from the last position of Franklin’s ships. It lay partially out of its cradle on a sledge and had neither oars nor paddle. M’Clintock calculated the total weight of the sledge to be 1,400 pounds, a ridiculously heavy burden for sailors ridden with scurvy and close to starvation. The only provisions in sight were 40 pounds of tea, a quantity of chocolate, and a small jar of animal fat, probably walrus, that surprisingly enough tasted of chicken and burnt onions. For the rest, the boat was laden with an amazing amount of dead weight. Towels, scented soap, sponges, silver spoons and forks, twenty-six pieces of plate with Sir John Franklin’s crest, and six books, all of them scriptural or devotional works. Two skeletons lay in the boat, both of them without their skulls. The skeleton in the bow, M’Clintock wrote, obviously considerate of Lady Franklin’s feelings, had been disturbed “by large and powerful animals, probably wolves.”
A BORN JACKDAW, Jock Roberts had brought back mementos from his long and arduous voyage with M’Clintock. A silk handkerchief, two buttons from an officer’s greatcoat, a hair-comb and, most baffling, a black satin skullcap with curious symbols embroidered on it both inside and out. Clearly the skullcap was not standard Royal Navy issue and was unlikely to have belonged to any member of the expedition. So it was immediately assumed that it had been left behind by native scavengers of the site and was probably the property of a shaman. This, however, led to the intriguing conjecture that, contrary to popular belief, there was at least one wandering band of Eskimos sufficiently advanced to have a rudimentary form of a written language. Then one day Jock Roberts, hard-pressed for cash to support his drinking habit, took the satin skullcap to the curator of the northern museum in Edmonton, rambled on at length about its origins, and speculated that such a rare Eskimo artifact was worth plenty. The curator, who happened to be a doctor of divinity, denounced Roberts as a lying drunkard. “Don’t take us for fools here,” he said. “These so-called symbols embroidered into the fabric are not Eskimo, but Hebrew. For your information the inscription on the outside says, ‘Observe the Sabbath, to keep it Holy’ and inside we have what I take to be the rightful owner’s name. ‘Yitzchak ben Eliezer.’ I suggest that you return it to him immediately. Good day to you, sir.”